Why Fiction is More Believable
Introduction
I just finished watching Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex, which revolves around fraudulent corporate–government collusion. What struck me wasn’t the plot itself but how compelling it was. Fictional crimes like this often provoke more intrigue than real ones of similar scale. Not for society at large (which responds more like a passive audience to live players1), but for the individual spectator. Especially when the consequences aren’t apocalyptic, nothing ever happens.
So the obvious question is: why does the real thing so often fail to evoke the same depth of response?
An interesting real-world actor in this space was Hindenburg Research, a group of activist short-sellers. They uncovered several major financial frauds—most famously, against Adani: large-scale stock manipulation, shell companies, and regulatory capture (link). These are crimes that span continents and billions of dollars, and yet, unless you were embedded in financial discourse in 2023, they barely registered.
My current answer is that the difference isn’t in the scale or even the drama, but in the narrative infrastructure. Reality is raw data. The viewer must impose narrative structure onto events—identify Chekhov’s guns, construct causal chains, resolve ambiguities. In fiction, meaning accumulates by design. In the real world, it’s something like inverse archaeology: you have to excavate meaning forward, without knowing what you’re looking for.
Group-level selection
A pet theory of mine, or rather a hammer that has deformed the world into a panoply of nails, is the idea of group self-selection. People self-sort in all things2, including their baseline literacy in finance, governance and institutional infrastructure. What appears empty or dull to most, reads to more sophisticated audiences as a dense, structured narrative. A short-seller report from Hindenburg on Adani or Super Micro can be more electrifying than fiction if and only if you’re familiar with the terms of art.
Patrick McKenzie writes well about this in the context of bureaucratic institutions. He’s particularly good at dissolving the illusion of solidity around things like banks, government rules, or compliance structures. These systems look monolithic, but they’re just humans in coordination—scripts written by committees and executed imperfectly.3
Fiction selects only the structurally relevant players. You begin with the lackeys to set the mood, but by the midpoint you’re in quiet boardrooms overlooking the city. The Clueless middle managers that enact or hide the crimes are erased. In contrast, reality is all middle. There is no final act, no violin crescendo building to a plot climax, and no cut to black.
False solidity
But there’s a deeper metaphysical question. What if our need for stories is a refusal to face the void directly? In Buddhist terms, sunyata is not nihilism but the absence of inherent structure. The world is not unstructured, but its structure is conditional, dependent, relational. So too with institutions, laws, crimes, and the stories we try to build out of them.
Deleuze, in The Logic of Sense, suggests that narratives don’t explain events—they are events. To create a narrative is not to interpret reality, but to generate a surface across which sense can glide. The difference is that fiction gives you a smooth surface; real life offers you a mess of broken planes, half-connected strata, recursive structures with no master signifier. The only way to “read” it is to be the author yourself.
Which is maybe the point. There are no Chekhov’s guns. Or equally, everything is a Chekhov’s gun.
-
Samo Burja:
A live player is a person or well-coordinated group of people that is able to do things they have not done before. A dead player is a person or group of people that is working off a script, incapable of doing new things.
-
As Yudkowsky writes in Evaporative Cooling of Group Beliefs:
In Festinger, Riecken, and Schachter’s classic When Prophecy Fails, one of the cult members walked out the door immediately after the flying saucer failed to land. Who gets fed up and leaves first? An average cult member? Or a relatively skeptical member, who previously might have been acting as a voice of moderation, a brake on the more fanatic members? After the members with the highest kinetic energy escape, the remaining discussions will be between the extreme fanatics on one end and the slightly less extreme fanatics on the other end, with the group consensus somewhere in the “middle.”
-
Something I want to explore more is the false solidity of modern life, falser than ever. Even your house is just a soft shell around pipes and wires and legal definitions. Mathematical theorems, scientific paradigms, rituals, cultural codes, the language we use, all of these are contingent and were subject to the vicissitudes of history. Sometimes, extremely competent people were involved in making them, but still: just people. In this view, Steve Jobs’s reminder that the world around you was built by people no smarter than you is another reminder of śūnyatā. ↩